Jon is Away! said:Nobody Here said:More to the point, I don't believe what I did post was "foul bile"
anyway. It was criticism. Neither was it addressed particularly at
you, although it did happen to get sent as a followup to one of your
posts. Take it or leave it. No one's seemed to take it seriously
enough to respond to the points I raised, so either they're inescapably
correct and everyone's too chastened to reply, or no one else shares
my POV and cares enough to argue.
Except that looking over the thread I see that all of your posts have
been responded to and "answered" in some way.
Quoted message said:I suspect the latter, but I don't let
it bother me. Frankly, if you (in general, not Ambrose) can't see the
parallels between many poster's attitudes to other road users and motorists
views then you're all deluding yourselves. Whatever, it's counterproductive,
any only serves to widen the gap in perception that several of you have
argued in this thread that you are trying to close (by opposing the
purpose and reporting of the protest). I think it smacks of double
standards, and it sticks in my craw.
But at the same time the reporting is counterproductive, and (in the
grand scheme of things) so (potentially) is the protest. The "news" in
that report is that for some reason that crossing has a higher than
average level of cycle-pedestrian incidents than anywhere else. Given
that it is (presumably) near a school this could reflect the level of
children cycling without enough knowledge to do so safely. If this is
the case then a better campaign would be for a cycle training course at
the school.
That might well be the case. However as far as I'm aware there are
few protests against either bikes or cars anywhere in the country
anyway. There are the odd one or two reported, the last one I remember
before that one was some blokewho stuck the contents of a living room
into the middle of "his" road in a sort of "drive more carefully you
tossers" protest. There have undoubtedly been other protests before
and since that I've not noticed.
It seems unfair to criticise these protesters, or indeed the reporting
of them, just because there might be better things to protest about.
It's obviously something they see as enough of an issue for them to get
off their asses to protest about, and so be it. To dismiss it as
counterproductive is to dismiss the danger, whatever it might be, to
their kids as irrelevant. It isn't to them, presumably. Worse,
as some have done in this thread, to denounce them in terms like "They
probably drive their kids to school anyway" and "they probably don't
have any road sense" is just disgraceful. It might well be that they
could do with a cycle training course at the school. These parents
weren't protesting about that, though, they were protesting about
cyclists running into 5 people in the last year outside the school.
If 5 people had been run into by anything outside *my* kid's school,
I'd be up in bloody arms about it, too, and I defy any parent to
say they wouldn't. "Oh, don't worry about it, it's not the big
issue, at least they weren't hit by a truck."
It's not *reporting* bad cycling behaviour that gives cyclists bad
press, bad cycling behaviour does that all by itself. There is
possibly noone here that cycles or drives in an urban who does not
see bad practice each and every day, both by cyclists and by other
road users. Of *course* it gets used as an excuse by motorists to
lambast cyclists, much like it gets used practically every day on
this here newsgroup by cyclists to pillory motorists.
Quoted message said:
That is of course pure supposition. The problem (as I believe I've
already mentioned) is that reporting of cycling in Britain is largely
negative which leads the cynical to suspect such articles as being
biased.
Possibly. But that doesn't excuse some of the comments here.
--
Nobby Anderson
